Radium Factory Poses Threat To Nyc

October 4, 1987|By DAVID E. PITT, The New York Times

NEW YORK -- For decades, a New York-based company -- believed to be the last commercial radium supplier in the western hemisphere -- has been mishandling, and even losing, bits of the deadly radioactive element in the city, a two- year inquiry by a State Assembly committee has found.

Concern mounted last week as the 75-year-old Radium Chemical Co. sidestepped a state deadline to vacate and decontaminate its factory in Queens County. The company`s one-story, brick building has become a major potential threat to public safety, officials say. The Friday deadline, which the company can appeal up to Oct. 16, was the latest of several imposed, beginning four years ago.

Investigators for the Assembly`s Environmental Conservation Committee obtained state and city records showing that despite a 1983 state ban on ``all commercial operations,`` the factory since has received at least 30 shipments of radium from users, helping to swell its inventory to nearly one-and-a-half times the state limit; that some of the sealed radium vials were leaking; and that the company has failed to monitor its employees` exposure to radiation.

Officials say that although there is no immediate danger to the public, the factory has become a repository for an enormous amount of radium that could find its way into the ground, the air and the water table if there was a fire or explosion. The radium, non-explosive but highly radioactive, is in the form of ``needles`` manufactured for use in a largely outdated cancer therapy.

More than a year ago, investigators learned, traces of radiation 10 times higher than normal were detected by state and city inspectors in a sewer outside the factory in Woodside, a few doors from a popular health club along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

State and city radiologists said the sewer radiation levels were too low, and too removed from pedestrian traffic, to pose a health hazard.

But Dr. Leonard R. Solon, head of the city Health Department`s division of radiation control, said: ``In my judgment, this facility has no business being in the city and should be removed.``

The investigators assert that the company`s conduct in Queens is consistent with a pattern dating to the 1920s, when the same family operated the Radium Dial Co., a luminous-watch factory in Ottawa, Ill., whose practices have been blamed for the deaths of scores of young dial painters who contracted radium-related cancers. The controversy, which began with worker deaths at a competitor`s factory in East Orange, N.J., is one of the most famous in the annals of nuclear medicine.